Traditional Epiphany ceremony

Chrisomallos from Greece holds up a wooden cross after he retrieved it during an Epiphany ceremony in Izmir, Turkey, yesterday. The traditional Epiphany ceremony marks the Epiphany when Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, the spiritual leader of the world’s Orthodox Christians, or an Orthodox priest throws a simple wooden cross into the water and swimmers race to be the first to retrieve it. In Izmir, Turkey’s third largest city, it was the first ‘official’ Epiphany ceremony there since the end of a Greek-Turkey war nearly a century ago.